When comparing systemd vs OpenRC, the Slant community recommends OpenRC for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux init systems?”OpenRC is ranked 1st while systemd is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose OpenRC is:

OpenRC follows the UNIX philosophy of 'do one thing and do it well', while it's true that it has more features than sysvinit, it does not stay away from its primary function with unnecessary added features.

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Pros

Pro

Login management out of the box

Systemd contains a daemon called logind which is used for managing user logins.

Pro

Cgroups processes control

Systemd groups all processes by services using Linux's cgroups. Think about memory/cpu/tasks/IO/Net limits and accounting for any service.

Pro

Default for many popular distributions

Systemd is the default init system for many popular Linux distributions (Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, etc..). It should also be noted that some of those distributions allow users to use a different init system if they want.

Pro

UNIX-Like

WTF? SYSTEMD UNIX-LIKE??????????

Pro

No feature creep

OpenRC follows the UNIX philosophy of 'do one thing and do it well', while it's true that it has more features than sysvinit, it does not stay away from its primary function with unnecessary added features.

Pro

Fast

OpenRC builds on top of sysvinit and adds some more useful features (like parallel booting) while still the simplicity that sysvinit is know for. Because of this it generally boots faster than other init systems, especially when parallel booting is enabled.

Pro

Extremely simple

All configuration is done via shell scripts and symlinks. Shell scripts can then use various specialized utilities to ease the development of init scripts.

Pro

Less dependency creep

Using OpenRC does not lock in a distribution by providing specific NON-POSIX extra services which programs then would rely on.

Pro

A very balanced compromise

Basically OpenRC doesn't replace SysV init, but rather works with it, providing features that SysV is lacking while taking advantage of its benefits. It's also used by a fair amount of reasonably popular distros and is well supported and developed.

Cons

Con

Not UNIX-like

One of the main argument that people who are against using systemd is that it does not follow on of UNIX'S core philosophies. 'Do one thing and do it well', instead systemd represents a collection of dozens of tightly coupled libraries. With responsibilities that exceed those of a simple init system because it also tries to handle things like device management, power management, mount points, cron, encryption, syslog, network configuration etc...

Con

Makes dependent products difficult to port

Software dependent on systemd. Becomes difficult to port to systems that lack systemd.

Con

Lead developer shows near complete lack of care for standards of quality needed for developing a part of an OS as integral as the init system is

Con

No socket activation

OpenRC does not have socket activation yet. It will be added in the future though.

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